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SHORT BIOGRAPHY of ALFRED ADLER
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Adler was born near Vienna as second son of a grain merchant on February 7th, 1870. As a child he seems to have suffered from "organ inferiority", so that his later theoretical concept may also date from the own experience. However, he courageously overcame his physical and emotional handicaps. In 1888 he enrolled as a student of medicine at Vienna University graduating in 1895. Two years later he married Raissa Timofejevna Epstein, a Russian student and socialist.
Adler specialised in ophthalmology, internal medicine and neurology. In 1902 Adler first met with Sigmund Freud. Adler was among the first four members of the Freudian "Wednesday Society" (next to Stekel, Kahane and Reitler). His close collaboration with Freud continued until 1911. Adler is regarded as the most prominent and most independent of Freud's associates within the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
In 1907 Adler published his "Study on Organ Inferiority", thus providing a biological foundation for depth psychology and also making an independent contribution to psychosomatic medicine. The key concept in Adlers's "Study" is that of compensation and overcompensation with regard to physical and intellectual deficiencies, a central issue in his later work. Freud welcomed this original approach and tried to incorporate it in his psychoanalytic system.
But the two pioneers of depth psychology differed both in character and in philosophy of life. This became evident in 1911, when Adler questioned the important elements of psychoanalysis. He doubted the universal validity of the Oedipus complex, the theory of libido, psychic determinism, wish-fulfilment account of dreams etc. The break with Freud became inevitable. Adler together with a dozen or more of supporters resigned from the Psychoanalytic society and founded his own "Society für Individual Psychology".
Adler at first called his own theory "Comparative Individual Psychology" since, as opposed to Freud's systematizing and schematizing method, he wished to to do justice to the individuality of man. In 1912 he outlined his innovative ideas in his main work "The Neurotic Constitution" (Über den nervösen Charakter). This important work, which owes more to Nietzsche than to Freud, places the will to power at the center of psychopathology. The psyche is motivated not by the desire for pleasure (Lust) but by the need for self-esteem which degenerates under the influence of anxiety and inferiority complexes into a striving for power.
"The Neurotic Constitution" marks the beginning of ego psychology (Ich-Psychologie), to which many Freudians subsequently turned their attention, and also contains the basis for holistic and social psychology. Case-studies of neurosis are examined within the context of human relations. Neurosis is defined as a "deviating from reality" by means of character pathology, the symptoms of which provide a safeguard against life's difficulties. Adler thinks that which a suitable education such undesirable developments could be avoided. In a collection of essays entitled "To Heal and to Educate" (1914) Adler and his co-authors C. Furtmüller and E. Wexberg outlined the possible role of education in the prevention and cure of neurosis.
During World War I, Adler served as a military doctor. He was deeply moved by the collective madness of the war, which he attributed - in accordance with his socialist views - to a failure on the part of the ruling classes in Europe. After the war he devoted himself with renewed energy to the further development of individual psychology in theory and practice, which he increasingly felt to be a remedy for a world made sick by its craze for power.
It was during that time, that the concept of "common sense" and "social interest" (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) became central to his theory. He was convinced that, when in difficulty, only a person who had, as a result of pampering and neglect in childhood, aquired no disposition to live and work sociably with others would become ill. The healing of mental illness necessitated arousing in a patient the ability to cooperate and communicate, a training in being a social person. This social trait of individual psychology brought in many friends and supporters amongst the "humanist left".
Adler and his colleagues began enthusiastically to reform the education system in Vienna , reducing the rigid discipline in the school and transforming them into learning communities based on the principle of mutual aid. In dozens of educational advice centers parents, teachers, doctors and social workers were provided with practical examples of how to deal with children more freely. In 1931 an individual psychological experimental school was established by Oskar Spiel, Ferdinand Birnbaum and Franz Scharmer.
In 1926 Adler made his first visit to the USA where his optimistic teaching on the learning ability of man and the necessity for cooperation met with great approval. Adler also emphasized the need to improve marital relations with the aid of psychology. He spoke English with difficulty but his lectures at many leading universities in North America were nevertheless well acclaimed.
By the middle of the nineteen-twenties Adler had found increasing fame in Central Europe and the USA as a leading personality in the sphere of child psychology and human relations. The "International Journal of Individual Psychology" was founded and appeared regularly until 1937. Adler worked tirelessly in Europe and the USA as a lecturer and organizer aiming to spread knowledge of his concept. In almost all larger European cities there were individual psychology groups.
In the following decade Adler lived in the United States, a suite in the Grammercy Park Hotel in Manhattan/New York became his home most of the time. Later, Chicago became one of Adler's most important bastions. Adler was appointed visiting professor of medical psychology at the Long Island College of Medicine in New York. He partially adapted his ideas of Holism, the emphasis on human subjectivity of aims and values in life and of social preventive medicine to the activism and optimism of the American middle-class. He gained great popularity in the USA, to a certain extent because of the generous financial support given him by the millionaires Edward Filene and Charles Henry Davis. Freud, on the other hand, could mention the USA only in pejorative and sarcastic terms.
Adler published a dozen or more books in the period from 1914 to 1933. Amongst those of exceptional quality are for example: "The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology" 1920 (Praxis und Theorie der Individualpsychologie), "Understanding Human Nature" 1927 (Menschenkenntnis, trans. Colin Brett, Oneworld Publications, Oxford 1992), "The Technique of Individual Psychology" 1928/1930 (Die Technik der Individualpsychologie"), "Religion and Individual Psychology" 1933, "The Science of Living" (New York 1929), "The Pattern of Live" (New York 1930) and "What Life Should Mean to You" (Boston 1931, new tr. Colin Brett, "What Live Could Mean to You", Oneworld Publ., Oxford 1992). In his later works towards the end of the nineteen-twenties and the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, written largely with an American public in mind, Adler delated all reference to Marxist or materialistic thinking and concentrated wholly on the relationship between parents and children and between the sexes. Whereas his criticism of capitalism increasingly faded, his attack on the male dominance as a destructive force in society retained its vigour.
During these years Adler's life became rather hectic. He was prescient of unfortunate developments in politics and culture and whished to ward them off with his humanist and democratic theory. As early as 1919 he had described Bolshevism as a degeneration of socialist thought and hat seen no future in it. He foresaw the failure of communism since it had embarced on a course of unfettered power striving. The rise of fascism also frightened Adler, who diagnosed this barbaric ideology as a relapse into the Middle Ages.
The unwavering optimist and philanthropist turned his gaze to the USA where he founded refuge for his new educational ideas, his psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine. In 1930 he made his permanent home in the USA. His wife Raissa, who continued to sympathize with the Russian Revolution, and three of his four Chilfdren (Alexandra, Nelly and Kurt) followed him at a later date under pressure from the Nazis. Valentine, another daughter, who had settled in Russia with her husband disappeared in Stalin's concentration camps.
Although fascist rule had already established itself in some countries, Adler, now ailing, often traveled to Europe to give lectures and seminars. Before one such lecture in Aberdeen/Scotland he died after a heart-attack. He was buried in Aberdeen on May 28th, 1937. Adler was only 67 when he died, compared to Freud's 83 and Jung' 86 years.
This death at a comparatively early stage was detrimental to the spread of individual psychology. Still greater damage was done by the fascist scourge and the Second World War. Most of the world was no longer accessible to the message of a universal social interest, mutual aid and peaceful human relations.
On the occasion of Adler's death it was said that he was a unique thinker, that his theories had been the centre of public debates for decades and had found as many enthusiastic followers as bitter opponents. In England and even more so in the USA, he has a reputation as one of the most famous Austrian thinkers. His psychology is an outline of ethics, "of almost a Confucian simplicity and realism" (Philip Mairet). Adler is with Freud one of the greatest psychologists of the world. With Freud and Jung, the most influential constellation in depth psychology, he had a lasting effect on civilization, which may reasonably be compared to the impression made by Charles Darwin on a previous generation.
Translated by John Burns, Berlin (July 1998)
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